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Farm Hack

We are developing our website and expanding our offering of in-person events.

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Farm Hack

Farm Hack

Farm Hack

Farm Hack

Farm Hack

We are developing our website and expanding our offering of in-person events.

We are developing our website and expanding our offering of in-person events.

We are developing our website and expanding our offering of in-person events.

We are developing our website and expanding our offering of in-person events.

Farm Hack
Farm Hack
Farm Hack
Farm Hack
1 Campaign |
Lee, United States
$741 USD 16 backers
2% of $25,000 Flexible Goal Flexible Goal
Choose your Perk

Stickers

$10 USD
Est. Shipping
December 2013
4 claimed

Bandanas

$25 USD
Est. Shipping
December 2013
6 claimed

Cutting board

$75 USD
Est. Shipping
December 2013
4 claimed
FARM HACK is suspending this campaign and will relaunch with new content and new perks in 2014.   We look forward to your future support in making the best agricultural tools open source.

About Us:

Farm Hack is an open source community that builds, designs, and documents tools for resilient agriculture - this community of farmers, designers, developers, engineers, architects, and others with an interest in a more adaptive and open food system lives both through in-person meet-ups and hack-a-thons as well as on-line. Farm hackers join the community by participating at events or through online contributions and you can too!

Here are some examples of open source tools the community has developed or documented:

Cover crop roller

This tool is designed to increase organic matter in soil, retain moisture, reduce cultivating passes and herbicide use. It functions by stressing the annual cover crop at the vulnerable point between when the plant puts energy into producing seed, but before it produces viable seed. Culticycle

This is a pedal powered tractor that can cultivate, seed, spray, or pull gear for most low horsepower tasks. Small tractors do many jobs very well and very fast, but also consume fuel, compact soil, cost a lot, and cause physical damage to the operator – mainly spine and joint problems. Many of their jobs could be done, slower but better, by human pedal power.

FIDO - Greenhouse Monitoring with Text Message Alerts

A farmer-built electronic tool that can monitor greenhouse temperature, record greenhouse data, and alert the farmer to problems in the greenhouse via cell phone text message. This tool is much more affordable and useful than commercially available greenhouse alarms and has led to other hacks such as Rover, an electric fence monitor.


Farm Hack is a non-profit farmer-driven open source design platform.  Farm Hack’s forums and wikis facilitate collaborative development between individuals and between organizations, accelerating the cross pollination of ideas and systems understanding.  

Farm Hack received its 501c(3) status in September and this jumpstart of crowd-sourced capital will help launch the next phase of development. We have come a long way on volunteerism and support from our founding partners, but you can help us take the next step to grow and strengthen the community even further.

What We Need & What You Get

Our goal for this Indiegogo campaign is to raise $25,000 so that we can continue development on our website and make it easier to contribute to and improve and to create a robust, convivial, beautiful operating platform for our growing community of users. We’ll also spend that money continuing with our in-person gatherings on farms, to expand the community into more states and countries by building on our existing international community.

1. Farm Hack’s web development goals($15,000)

Farm Hack's web development to date has been entirely through volunteer efforts. Our priority is to use development funds to leverage this volunteer open source development and to build a system that encourages user generated development and improvements.  Some of the priorities are:  
  • Online videos and tutorials on how to use collaborative farm hack web tools to share and improve the service.
  • build out Farm Hack's Open Shops feature including embedding of Open Shops off-site
  • integration with GitHub to facilitate software collaboration and Q&A
  • tool rating functionality
  • create marketplace and classifieds section of website to promote community skills, kits, classes, and exchange
  • develop a collaborative "sandbox" platform for early tools and projects
  • start 3D library for mechanical tools, including standard design elements and fabrication shop components

 2. Backend administrative and coordination of In-person events: ($10,000)

  • Organizing, convening, outreach for events and documentation support
  • host events in new areas of the country and send community members to spread Farm Hack culture, methodology, and knowledge
  • develop new "skill day" events in coordination with Ada Bio Autoconstruction
  • Farm Hack Regional Mini-Conference in the North-East region
  • International Farm Hack event in Quebec with Ada Bio Autoconstruction

Farm Hack board members and Key Contributors
These backgrounds provide just a hint of skilled resources of the thousands of the people who got this project to where it is today.

Dorn Cox is the President of the board for Farm Hack and director of GreenStart.  He is also a farmer working the 250 acre four generation family farm in New Hampshire.  He has designed and constructed systems for small scale grain and oilseed processing and bio-fuel production, developed no-till and low-till equipment and associated cover cropping systems.  Dorn is also a founding board member of the New England Farmers Union and serves as a vice president to the New Hampshire Association of Conservation District and was awarded the 2007 NHFB Young Farmer Achievement Award.  He is currently a PhD student at the University of New Hampshire developing biological, social and economic systems that return carbon to the soil. 

Severine v T Fleming is the secretary of Farm Hack and is the director and founder of Greenhorns. She is on the board of the Schumacher Center for New Economics, on the education committee for NOFA NY, and has organized mixers, panels, workshops, protests, art stunts, film festivals and trainings for beginning farmers with over 190 organizational partners in 30 states.

Dan Paluska has been involved with robotic engineering since 1997, working in the MIT AI Lab and MIT Media Lab. His research work was featured on the cover of Wired Magazine, in USA TODAY, and on various TV programs. His robotic artwork won was the Prix Ars Electronica and has been featured in galleries in the US and Europe. Dan currently teaches at RISD in Providence Rhode Island and questions his technological past. He is pursuing heirloom skills and land-based living in rural Maine and wondering which technologies are actually serving our communities and well-being.

Chris Yoder has been farming for 20 years running a CSA called Vanguardens in Dover, MA and is on the board of Waltham Community Fields, an educational farm based on an abandoned UMass experimental breeding station. He and his brother Lu, and Lu’s lady Emily Vogler worked together on the bike-powered vegetable washer prototype and detailed documentation for one of the first open-source kits-for-sale on OPEN SHOPS.

Rob Rock is a farmer/inventor in the Intervale in Burlington, VT and spends his winter doing professional fabrication work which has spilled over onto the farm. Rob has focused on bike-powered equipment that matches his preferred bed size for organic vegetables and particularly salad and greens production. He is famous for the dramatic flame-weeder, greens washers, tractors and seeders he built as well as many innovative hacks around the farm.

Andy Wekin is the co-founder and head engineer at Pedal Power Engineering and has served as a consultant to UVM Engineering and MIT D-Labs. He has an MS in Mechanical Engineering from Washington State University and is primarily interested in appropriate technology and renewable energy systems. He has designed and built pedal powered machines for farms and small businesses, energy efficient houses, solar powered vehicles, and micro hydro systems.

About our Founding organizational partners and Open-shop keepers. Farmhack’s core organizing and governing team have a lot of experience not only in farm-hacking and engineering projects, but also within the larger new farmers movement as organizers, as farmers and with extensive network of affiliated sustainable farming organizations.

Greenstart’s mission is to foster a resilient energy and food system for New Hampshire by providing technical education and practical agricultural examples. Greenstart’s Director, Dorn Cox is the board president of Farm Hack. Greenstart sees food and fuel security as the end product of a vibrant, sustainable agriculture system. To achieve this end, GreenStart facilitates projects that
1) Increase soil carbon “banking”
2) Decrease energy inputs
3) Increase both food and fuel outputs (positive energy and carbon balance)
 4) Promote “tight” cycling of nutrients
5) Provide open-source access to appropriate knowledge, seeds and equipment

Greenhorns is a 6 year old grassroots organization for young farmers, Board member Severine v T Fleming is director and founder of the Greenhorns, serving as Farm Hack’s community organizing arm, connecting us with farmers and project partners across the country. Greenhorns also produced our new Farm Hack video! Severine is on the board of the Schumacher Center for New Economics, on the education committee for NOFA NY, and has organized mixers, panels, workshops, protests, art stunts, film festivals and trainings for beginning farmers with over 190 organizational partners in 30 states.

National Young Farmer's Coalition incubated Farm Hack, Ben Shute and Severine Fleming organized our first event at MIT back in 2009. Ben & Lindsey Shute's problem of dehydrated greenhouse inspired the collaboration of himself with RJ and Louis to create FIDO, our first SARE funded project. Ben and Lindsey run a 600 family share Community Supported Agriculture farm in Clermont, NY and he has served on the board of URGENCI, an international network of CSA movements. NYFC remains a closer partner with Farm Hack.

Future Farmers
, an art collective in San Francisco has contributed website design to the Farmhack process, Amy Francheshini, a leader of the collective, is also an art and industrial design educator, and came to the Ithaca Farm Hack in 2012 to attend a headwater brainstorm conversation with Jeff Pietzek, Dorn and Severine where we worked on the concept for OPEN FARM MAPs.

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